Site Mobile Navigation

Serbia Seeks Rioters Who Set Fire to the U.S. Embassy

PRISTINA, Kosovo — Serbia’s top state prosecutor said Saturday that the authorities were hunting for the rioters who attacked the United States Embassy and other diplomatic missions last week.

“We are collecting evidence and are identifying the culprits,” the official, Slobodan Radovanovic, said in a statement.

The police said they had arrested nearly 200 rioters involved in Thursday’s protests, in which demonstrators, outraged at American support for an independent Kosovo, stormed the United States Embassy in Belgrade and set several rooms on fire. It was the worst violence to engulf the capital since pro-democracy demonstrators overthrew Slobodan Milosevic eight years ago.

The missions of Britain, Germany, Croatia and Turkey also were attacked, while looters went on a rampage across the Serbian capital. American officials said nonessential personnel from the embassy had been relocated.

One person died and 150 were injured. The Serbian daily Blic on Saturday reported the victim was a 21-year-old student who was originally from Kosovo.

For the past six days, Serbs have demonstrated across Serbia and Kosovo in an emotional and sometimes violent outpouring of anger at what many regard as the theft, sanctioned by the West, of their medieval heartland. The Serbian government has condemned Thursdays’ attacks, calling them the work of “isolated vandals.” But Serbia’s minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, blamed the United States.

“The U.S. is the major culprit for all troubles since Feb. 17,” Mr. Samardzic told the state news agency Tanjug, referring to the date of the declaration of independence by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leadership. “The root of violence is the violation of international law.”

Earlier, he said the torching of United Nations border posts in northern Kosovo by several hundred Serbian protesters reflected “government policy.” He indicated that it was part of the Serbian government’s wider goal of entrenching its control of the Serb-majority northern part of Kosovo and creating a de facto partition of the territory.

That aim seemed to be strengthening Saturday as Serbs in northern Kosovo erected a metal container and hung Serbian flags on electrical posts on a main road between Zubin Potok, a Serbian town, and Mitrovica, a city divided between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.

Meanwhile, reports were growing here that Serbian officers were deserting Kosovo’s multiethnic police force and pledging their allegiance to the government in Belgrade. The attack on the American Embassy, just days after the attacks at the border between Serbia and Kosovo, has raised alarms in the West that Serbia is fomenting violence in a campaign aimed at making international support for an independent Kosovo untenable.

The attack has been condemned by the United Nations Security Council, and the European Union has warned that a failure to stop further violence would damage Serbia’s prospects for forging closer ties.

While few Serbian analysts say they believe that Belgrade masterminded the attack during demonstrations that were meant to be a peaceful venting of anger against Kosovo’s independence, the Serbian defense minister, Dragan Sutanovac, of the Democratic Party, which supports closer ties with the European Union and Washington, has blamed nationalist politicians for encouraging the rioters.

Concerns about the government’s role also have been fanned by increasingly strident speech from other leading politicians, including Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, who helped lead the revolution that overthrew Mr. Milosevic in 2000. But in recent days, the prime minister has co-opted the nationalist language of his former nemesis.

The Serbian government is deeply split between the pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, who wants Serbia to join the European Union, and Mr. Kostunica, who is determined not to go down in history as the Serbian leader who lost Kosovo. The scenes of Serbian mobs suit Mr. Kostunica’s domestic political aim of punishing the West, analysts said.

The prime minister has been abetted by Tomislav Nikolic, the leader of Serbia’s far-right Radical Party. Mr. Nikolic had a strong showing in recent presidential elections and has adroitly exploited anger over Kosovo to argue that Serbia should look to Moscow instead.

“We will not rest until Kosovo is again under Serbia’s control,” Mr. Nikolic told the demonstrators on Thursday night as a mob gathered near the United States Embassy. “Hitler could not take it away from us, and neither will today’s Western powers.”

While few doubt that the strident language played a role in stirring the violence, leading Serbian and Western analysts say that it does not appear to have been a premeditated coordinated attack, though they have not ruled it out.

Many European and American diplomats have criticized the lack of police presence at the embassy before the attack, suggesting a degree of passive complicity.

But officials in Belgrade said that a majority of the attackers were young and drunk, and that the embassy attack did not appear to be well organized. Such a view is backed by the indiscriminate violence on Thursday, including attacks on journalists from Russia, Serbia’s most ardent supporter.

The most widely held view is that the attack was carried out by a fringe of staunch nationalists, many of them poor and from Serbia’s rural heartland, whose economic disillusionment, coupled with raw and real anger over Western backing of Kosovo’s independence, has boiled over into violent opposition to the United States and the European Union, which are viewed as the architects of the “false state.”

The rioters, analysts say, are “the losers of the transition” — those who have not benefited from Serbia’s transformation since Mr. Milosevic fell in 2000. Unemployment hovers around 21 percent, while Serbia’s annual per capita gross domestic product of about $7,400 makes it one of Europe’s poorest countries.

Misha Glenny, a prominent Balkan expert, argued that the protests had allowed Serbian nationalism and anger over the loss of Kosovo to vent itself.